Sounds like a diuretics scare.
When/where did Ronnie recount this story? I missed it.
It does sound like that, perhaps a mercury based one?
It was in this episode, but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp for you my friend.
Edit: 55:20Ronnie: I got up that morning I was going to the hospital,
my nutritionist talked me out of it because I thought I was dying, felt like I was dyingRonnie: Because I had fainted the night before,
I did pass out when I was putting on my tan I fell backwards in the tub. One minute I was wide awake, the next minute I was waking up in the tub like what happened.
Ronnie: I drunk a whole gallon
Patrick: So you were on diuretics?
Ronnie: Yeah well, I guess. I don't know, I can't say for sure. He was my nutritionist and he gave me everything
Patrick: He gave you everything?
Ronnie:
Yeah yeah, he put something in a glass and said drink thisThe blind faith on Ronnie's behalf is just baffling to me. He also states he has "1,000%" [sic] trust for Chad and did 'everything' that he told him to do.
Whether Mersalyl is the cause of any of Chad's clients health problems I don't know. It caused the odd fatality due to mercury poisoning according to google. I don't know if it caused kidney damage specifically. In any case, giving it to clients, who didn't care enough to even know what it was (so some blame falls upon them too) sounds reckless in the extreme. It takes a madman to play with them in this manner. Prince was supposedly shooting speedballs and using handfuls of Advil - this excuse is seen as kind of joke here but the fact of the matter is that it's toxic. Lots of NSAIDs and other painkillers have been recalled and banned due to tons of deaths from heart attacks and organ failure.
What kind of blame could be levelled at Chad for what happened to Dallas for example? As a matter of fact you wouldn't need any kind of medical tests to know that Dallas was at risk of imminent death - ALL guys his size have a hypertrophic heart that is at risk for electrical problems and so on. The only healthy advice for him would have been to say it's over, stop bodybuilding and hope some of the changes would be partly reversible.
I didn't watch Shawn Ray's video - what is his advice for these bodybuilders? What exactly is an acceptable level of drug use according to him?
Ronnie did take an extended layoff after many Os. Other gurus like Patrick Tuor have their athletes come off while eating a low protein diet for a few months after shows. This is because prep is damaging by necessity. It can't be done completely safely.
Bodybuilding pharmacology is experimental and no one can predict what the end result will be from the combination of a wide variety of drugs in different classes. Doesn't even matter if the guru is an actual doctor. Other sports have crazy chemical experimenters too. In the early days of cycling you had cyclists using a witches brew called "pot belge", supposedly so fucked up on a combo of narcotics that if they had an accident they would lie in a ditch while their legs kept pedaling. Later you had cyclists using so much EPO that they had to sleep with heart monitors to avoid dying in their sleep.
Well said, unfortunately.
As for Shawn, he did not detail what is and isn't acceptable levels of drug use, conveniently.
